Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday February 05, 2013 @04:10PM
from the just-in-time-for-national-adopt-a-cat-month dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The WSJ reports that OUYA, the $100 Android-based gaming console, will reach retail availability in June. The makers have partnered with Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, and Target for distributing the devices. The console will come with a controller (which has the traditional thumbsticks, D-pad, buttons, and triggers as well as a built-in touchpad), and additional controllers will be sold for $50. OUYA CEO Julie Uhrman said, 'For the last year or two years all we've been hearing is that the consoles are dead. The reason is there isn't new, innovative intellectual property. It's expensive to develop on it. You're seeing a major shift of games being developed on the television. Our viewpoint has always been that console gaming isn't dead, the way we think about it hasn't changed. We're bringing the best screen and the best device to interact with that by creating a platform that is open.' There was a recent 'Game Jam' to create game prototypes for the console; you can browse the 166 entries."

I withdrew my backing after the first day of hype -- and I'm pretty easy to lure into your Kickstarter (I've backed about 450 of them, so far). I think the only value in this product will, ultimately, be in its conversation value as something sitting on your shelf in fifteen years. With the PS4 and the next Xbox coming out this year as well as the various Steam Boxes and the next round of high end GPUs for PC about to drop, the Ouya's brief appeal seems even less relevant. Most of the excitement at the time had been that it was touching on this mass appeal for *some* sort of new hardware in a world of aging seven-going-on-eight year old consoles this cycle.

Worse, the whole "we will support Ouya" thing became a plague on every single game related kickstarter afterward. And if you didn't say you were going to port your game to Ouya, people would spam your comments non-stop about "hey, you should contact Ouya and consider porting your game to it". Because when you're trying to produce a game on the cheap that is iffy to begin with, the best thing to do is hitch that wagon to an unreleased piece of hardware that will probably have little success and certainly not offer you anything remotely near the existing platforms that you're already developing the application for, like the PC. Blech.

Does anybody know why they left away the start/select button? Those seems rather fundamental to a whole lot of modern game designs and not having them will probably be a rather big annoyance. Do they have anything planed for the GUI that will address this issue?

While I agree that Ouya probably won't set the gaming world on fire, it does have a few major benefits over the existing consoles : Price and release date

The current generation XBox and PS debuted in the $300 - 600 range. Rumors have the next gen starting around $400. Meanwhile, neither of those two have a set release date. Sony has a press conference in a few weeks, and XBox is said to be targeting a holiday release schedule. Given those two factors, the only real competition for the Ouya is the WiiU. Of the two, Ouya is still cheaper and won't be as gimmicky as Nintendo's consoles.

The only wild card here is the Steambox. But that, too, has no set price or release date... and it'll mostly be banking on people who have Steam libraries already setup, and just want to play in their living room

If nothing else, Ouya will be a nice toy to tinker with... their intent to keep it 100% mod friendly certainly sets it apart from the other players.

An Ouya controller includes physical buttons and a trackpad, and games will be designed and balanced around this input device. What input device comes with the RK3066 Android stick? Sure, there's a USB hub, but there's really not much standardization in the button layout of USB game controllers [pineight.com]. I'm not fully convinced that all users will have the time to sit through control calibration ("Press up, down, left, right, jump, shoot, in that order") for each new game that they install.

sure, XboxLive, with a $50/year fee.... You can't even watch Netflix on the Xbox with a paid Netflix subscription without XBox Live. As for the cheap/free game selection, I haven't looked in a while, but wasn't very good. I was under the impression that the dev fees for XBox were to high for most of the small game devs.

IMO, everyone misses the biggest deal with the OUYA: Its payment API stinks.

In the OUYA developer API: All programs must be down-loadable for free. There's no option to charge for the game first. There's no option to have a free version and a paid version -- It's got to be an in-app purchase if you want that, it's more complex and harder to get right, esp. from a security standpoint, esp. when trying NOT to annoy your customers. The payment API has re-occurring subscription payments, it has replenish-able items that can be bought multiple times (think Zynga Energy Bars, or game currency), and it has one time purchasable items (like unlockables). This means I just say NO to OUYA.

This means developers who just want to sell you the whole game once and you have it and that's it, really only have one option: Game Demo -> Try Out -> Purchase Rest of Game -> Wait for it to download the rest of the game. Otherwise, OUYA games really will be the most hackable: Download full game -> It's got locked features -> Run the keygen / crack. -> You've got the full game -- I wonder what the Venn diagram looks like for people to which a $100 console price point is compelling vs people who've ever ran a game keygen / crack... I bet it it looks pretty much like a single circle.

I've done research on the try-before-you buy "game demo" method in my own apps. What happens is that players impulsively download the games. Some forget about them, then delete them without ever playing the games. Most play the game first, feel their curiosity is mostly satisfied, then they forget about it and delete it later. A rare few will download the game, play the demo, then after that impulse has passed, return to the game and buy the "next episode" or "full game".

So folks like me who actually love making and playing games, and have no interest in being nickel and dimed to death or doing so to our customers see the OUYA as a non-starter. Less Choice Is Bad. OUYA gives devs LESS CHOICE about how to sell their game, they're betting big on the Free to Play (read: Pay to Win) model that I will never buy into. There's some controversy over whether or not game demos actually hurt sales [slashdot.org], so IMO it's foolish to leave no option other than to have game demos, or free to play. Additionally, I've done all the research I need. I've seen our sales numbers much lower for apps released with trials vs those without trials. A better method is to not do trials and simply reduce price slowly until you discover the impulse buy amount.

The OUYA dev platform didn't have all the payment and registration services even working to test games against when I checked a couple of weeks ago. As a developer: Screw OUYA. I'll release some of my 100% free games there if I remember. This console has "cheap" selling point that targets people opposite to the ones that will actually buy the games. The folks that have disposable income are the ones who unlock the full game after playing the demo. They're the ones that spend $60 on "energy" to get some in-game artificial delay, rather than the poorer sap who'll grind away tons of time to achieve the same. Protip: these non-in-game purchasing grinders are the bigger fans; The grinders will buy the next game, or nearly anything new you ever make -- esp. if it's not free-to play.

I'm not seeing WHY people will buy the OUYA (other than all the damn hype). Having a portable game system (smartphone / tablet) that can optionally hook up to the TV and use wireless gamepads, or having a portable game system / tablet and also spending an additional $100 non portable OUYA that you must hook up to your TV, uses a gamepad, and doesn't run all the games your smartphone / tablet will. Folks are not going to say: OUYA! Great! Now I don't need a SmartPhone! No, they'll buy those, and then see the OUYA and think either: "I've got disposable income, so I'

I watched the kickstarter video and they promised that all games would be "free-to-play". That'd be great for children and poor students who have plenty of time to grind but no money to purchase. I see that they pulled back that promise and turned it into "free-to-try", meaning that every game should have a crippled demo you can try before you buy. Just like all the other consoles. So much for revolutions. I guess getting $7M from the kickstarter made them forget revolutions and to look forward for the next opportunity to squeeze money..

Other than that, yet-another android platform. There's a remote possibility that nvidia could produce working complete-linux drivers, so ouya could be used for general purpose stuff. For a demo of this, refer to Ubuntu on Nexus 7.